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Oil Spill Points to Rig Fail-Safe as Utter Failure

With efforts to battle the massive Gulf Coast oil slick now demanding precedence, the question of who or what is to blame for the spill itself remains murky. One fact, however, is starkly clear: The piece of offshore-rig equipment designed to be “a drilling operation’s last line of defense” against leaks failed miserably.

When an oil rig has an uncontrolled oil pressure buildup — like the one thought to have set off the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig last week — a device called a blowout preventer (BOP) is supposed to deliver a hydraulic-powered “guillotine“-like slice to the drill pipe, crimping and sealing it off.

BOPs are mandated on all U.S. offshore oil rigs and are supposed to undergo regular inspection. Several studies have shown them to be increasingly reliable; however, they are not flawless.

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A robotic submarine attempts to activate a shutoff device known as a blowout preventer (BOP) to close off the flow of oil at the Deepwater Horizon well head.

Indeed, last year in an earnings call for Transocean, the owner of Deepwater Horizon, CEO Steve Newman told reporters: “We had a handful of BOP problems; nothing that I would characterize as systemic or quarter specific. … We are going back to address them in our management system so they don’t happen again. They were anomalies.”

But an especially disastrous BOP problem seems to be precisely the reason that oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico right now. Oil giant BP, which leased Deepwater Horizon from Transocean (and has thus far taken the lion’s share of the blame for the incident), reportedly is focusing on the BOP issue in its internal investigation.

“We don’t know why the BOP failed to stop the flow,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told the trade publication UpstreamOnline. “Ultimately we will recover the BOP, get it to the surface and find out.”

According to BP, workers attempted to activate the BOP manually from the top of the rig before they were evacuated, but nothing happened. (As the website ScienceInsider points out, the BOP should have automatically activated anyway.) After the rig sank, BP and the Coast Guard resorted to using robotic submarines to try to trigger the BOP underwater, to no avail.

Now BP appears to be ready to drill a new hole in order to fill the well with cement, an operation that will take at least three months — a delay that could result in the leakage of millions more gallons of oil.

Yet while both BP and Transocean have issued public apologies following the explosion and subsequent leak, the company that actually manufactured the BOP in place on Deepwater Horizon has remained curiously reticent about its role.

Cameron International, formerly known as Cooper Cameron, is the worldwide leader in providing BOPs to offshore rigs, according to industry website RigZone. The Houston oil and gas systems company has been recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for creating the first blowout preventer of its kind, all the way back in 1922. More on this story, please follow this link.